Pages 686–689
The 11 November evening slot, between the supper of pp. 627–638 and the midnight catastrophe of pp. 601–619 — the book has nearly finished assembling this one day. Hal goes looking for Schtitt's read on the afternoon and finds only deLint, prone over a floor-sized chart of names that doesn't include Hal's. Then Hal alone, skipping mandatory Study Period, in Viewing Room 6 with a cheek of Kodiak, his bad ankle propped, a wastebasket kept close on purpose, cycling through his dead father's film cartridges.
Terms, in order of appearance
- Kodiak (p. 686) — real smokeless-tobacco brand; Hal's non-secret vice.
- the run of titles (p. 687) — every cartridge Hal handles is in the endnote-24 filmography, if you want provenance.
- endnote 279 (p. 687) — the category the unnameable child actor falls into (a former E.T.A. whose name keeps eluding Hal), plus a flat sentence about how Hal actually feels right now; flip it.
- deuteragonist (p. 688) — real drama term: the second lead; Ogilvie's whole lecture hung on the distinction.
- Bob-Hopeless (p. 689) — coinage: without Bob Hope.
After you read: three things
1. One word choice does the damage. DeLint's verdict on the match: "You just never quite occurred out there, kid" (p. 686) — with regression figures to back up the nonoccurrence. The phrasing "chills Hal to the root." Set it beside deLint's bleacher observation that part of Hal "leaves and hovers and then comes back" (p. 682) and Hal's own private inventory at pp. 634–35; the scene is building a vocabulary of vanishing.
2. The little film is doing double character-work. Wave Bye-Bye to the Bureaucrat gets summarized in full — the blinking clocks, the sprint for the train, the choice of the bow-tied boy over the last feasible 0816, and the ending: "Mister? Are you Jesus?" / "Don't I wish." Mario loves it "possibly because of its unhip earnestness." Hal tells Mario "it's basically goo" and "secretly likes it, too" — and likes imagining himself in "the leisurely drive home toward ontological erasure" (p. 689). Both brothers, measured by one short film.
3. Watch what Hal declines, and what only you receive. Two of the cartridges are of Himself being interviewed — his father, speaking — and Hal passes over both. And the narrator hands you, over Hal's head, that Blood Sister: One Tough Nun "germinated out of" his father's one brief, unhappy pass through Boston AA (p. 689). You've spent a few hundred pages in those rooms; Hal never gets the fact at all. Meanwhile the body keeps its own ledger: Bob-Hopeless, Hal "spits way more than is his norm, now," keeps the wastecan near "in case he might throw up" — and that afternoon "he couldn't feel the ball on his stick."
Written only from this scene and earlier pages. Safe to read before you start.